http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/m...
I'm definitely not strictly veggie: I just wolfed down a nearly free burger when offered! And though I haven't flown for years, I may need to visit China once or more over the next couple of years.
I.e. one (or one thousandth, given his carbon footprint) less Zuckerberg? I could get behind that. Heck, I supported NPG back when I thought humanity had a chance.
The problem is still, it's unlikely to be the solution. If we want the west to change there are two ways to go.
1. Legislation - This is the force option, i.e. if you break the law you go to jail and we'll come and take your property by force.
2. Market - Make technology that makes alternatives easier/more efficient/sexier etc.
2 is hard especially if alternatives are more expensive or about the same. Cost of panel can't really go much lower so we're stuck. Many people on the eco side don't like Nuclear (they're crazy).
Technology is getting better and I think small steps in regulation (i.e. taxing emissions slightly) may work. That's the direction that we're heading in so I'm pretty hopeful.
1. There has to be some of this: no market is totally free, and free-riders are always a problem to some degree.
2. Actually this is exactly the flavour of product/service that I am working on. Have the more efficient solution be better and easier, not a hair shirt. The area we are working on could knock 5% off Europe's entire carbon footprint and save most families hundreds of USD per year also.
impact of eating meat for how long? one year? I know that going vegan for a year is better than getting an electric car.
While true, it basically sends the message of "If you have enough money you are free to do what you please to the detriment of the planet."
I'd like petrol to be 3 or 4 times the cost it is now. That would greatly reduce emissions, but fossil fuels could still be used in situations where there was no alternative (long distance flight, huge earthmoving machines?).
Inevitably, rich jerks would continue to ride their jetskis. So what?
You can't legislate people to have the right attitude. But taxing things does drive bulk behaviour.
I mention this just to share that there is some chance of this improving, even in areas we might not think likely. If it is a long-term mining operation (short-term someday, perhaps) then I can't think of a technical reason that prevents wind and solar being used to generate the on-site electricity.
A recent HN article was about one of the mining dump trucks being powered by battery and using regenerative braking to mean it was able to charge itself. Those giant diggers are already using braking in their cables that power their shovels. Maybe there is something to capture there, as well.
In my work, I had the chance to deal with some riggers and some crane operators (smaller stuff) by just exposure while collecting data. During that exposure, I learned something new. Lifting the stuff up is actually pretty easy. It is putting it down that is difficult. Maybe there is some energy to capture in that process?
But it wouldn't be a detriment, the extra cost would be derived from the expenses associated with offsetting the negative externalities (by cleaning pollution, planting trees, recycling, water purification, whatever).
Basically "only the rich shall eat healthy"
And to be totally honest, I want to tackle this issue through a startup called "standard pantry" which is the idea that one should have access to a standard pantry of goods and recipes (in place of a standard min income) and they should be able to sustain only and healthily feed themselves.
> only the rich shall eat healthy
With
> only the rich shall eat fancy
It's easy to eat healthy if you're not rich. Buy non-processed ingredients and cook them yourself.
That's the problem.
We need to educate on a basic standard pantry that allows healthy to be so easy that it doesn't even cross our minds.
If the only problem is nutrition education then that is not a rich person privilege.
A large majority of the public cannot afford Whole foods but are educated enough to understand that home cooked meals from non-processed ingredients are healthier than their counterparts.
If education is all it took we'd all be rich with six pack abs. (Derek Sivers.)
Habit rules all.
Make unhealthy food illegal? Make marketing unhealthy food illegal?
Hmm...
I learned to cook from my depression era grandmother. Home cooking is healthy, but not always cheap.
My grandmother used to tell me "this meal is $1.37 per serving"
As we made things, I learned to cook in le curset pots from a woman who used to travel the world with Martin yan and Julia child... (we were state department family and had a lot of opportunity)
But my main point remains: the "educate" is pArt-and-parcel to the whole greater idea of a home cooked meal: "family time"
"Fast food is the bane of existence as we have basically brought generations to not value what home cooking means... then we exploit them in the cheap labor force and perpetuate the idea that having a "home cooked meal" means that "the way mom used to cook it" is an actual phrase and it means the disruption of the basis of modern society, the family...
This issue can spiral and spiral, but my point is that rather than basic income, we need basic pantry - the basis of understanding, having access to, and the knowledge to cook a good meal without breaking the home (due to how hard people need to work at jobs for their ability to provide food on the table)
I'm there once a year. I'll pin this.
Amount US taxpayers spend yearly to subsidize meat and dairy : $38 billion
To subsidize fruits and vegetables : $17 million
US retail price of a pound of chicken in 1935 (adjusted for inflation) : $5.07
In 2011 : $1.34
Pounds of chicken eaten annually per American in 1935 : 9
In 2011 : 56
Revenue collected by US fishing industry per pound of fish caught : $0.59
Portion of this figure funded by taxpayers as subsidies : $0.28
Anyway here's another source that shows that meat consumption has dramatically increased since the 1920s, though that wasn't my central point:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/vis...
I want to show that there is a lot more murder today than before because of guns.
I pick one year (a far edge of the bell curve type of year) to compare to today where there was the least amount of murders and compare it to day.
Without showing an average or showing even a distribution bias should be expected. There is very little reason for picking a single year to these types of arguments and it is too often done.
https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/three-ways-climat...
I, for one at least, consider along the millions of years that evolution tried a version of homo sapiens that couldn't eat meat, and it was selected against...why would we now attempt to overturn the apparent wisdom of that selection?
That's pretty much a no-brainer for our health, for the environment and to reduce the suffering of millions of animals at the hands of the industrial livestock industry.
Personally, I used to eat meat multiple times a day, and now I only eat it once or twice a week. It has really improved my life. I think everyone should try it.
Because it doesn't scale."I've been disrupted by a leaner competitor!"
Our bodies specifically evolved for reproduction, but that doesn't stop us from using contraception when we have sex. Evolution also designed us to have wisdom teeth, but that doesn't stop people removing them.
Your argument assumes that natural selection has some kind of innate "wisdom", and that's just not true. Natural selection doesn't produce perfection or have any kind of intelligence behind it, it simply produces "good enough" (or, as we're on HN, the minimum viable product).
Also it's probably a mistake to attribute something like wisdom to what is essentially a statistical crap-shoot. The great temptation of religion is of course the idea that there is an Intelligence at work. But just to pick a silly example, does the dodo bird or the passenger pigeon think it was "wise" and "intelligent" for the forces of nature to select for meat-eating humans? Dodo philosophers and theologians in the last days - did they question why God would unleash such a fury on them?
Anyway I can tell you human ones will. Natural selection will most likely start killing off humans as soon as our technology can't keep up with all our baby-birthin'. It will manifest in forms you're already seeing in today's headlines. Voluntarily consuming less is an attempt to deal with it before the wisdom of natural selection deals with it.
Sounds promising. Maybe you can build a small or medium sized organization around trying to make that happen.
For example, it should be "three clicks and you're in" to found a virtual company and state "this is the problem we are going to solve, who's with me" - and another person from across the globe should be able to say "heck yeah let's do this" and then Facebook would say "that sounds great we will host your site/app/whatever and when you show traction on that problem you will hit level 1 funding of "X" and so on and so on..."
Facebook has the daily attention of over a billion people they claim, yet they literally just steal their energy and provide no building power.
Start a fucking economy and empower people unlucky enough to be born in a far reaching place such as the Congo but smart enough to know how to solve various problems affecting many.
Facebook is not making the world a better place until they do something like this.
So, I don't know if we actually need to change much at this point.
EX: Per person US emissions are down ~18% since 2000. We are on tack to hit 50% drop reasonably quickly.
I also strongly believe we would see more innovation and generally a more resilient economy.
The internet looked like it might help for a while, but it's currently being constricted by the ISPs and corporations like Facebook and Google, while more and more data is being tracked about each person at every moment. Authoritarianism broke down many times because you couldn't track what everyone doing and eventually someone managed to make a plan to fight against you. Information technology is just making it easier for authoritarians to maintain control